The Unconscious Mind On Film

Ted Serios was a man who lived in Chicago. He was a bellhop, he was a drunkard, and--depending on who you ask--he was either a great scammer or the possessor of a strange power. Serios seemed to be able to focus his attention on the lens of a Polaroid camera and produce an image--he called it a "thoughtograph"--of the contents of his mind.

The images Serios produced, under a variety of conditions & levels of experimental rigor, are haunting expressionistic combinations of the familiar and the alien. Some, the Chronicle of Higher Education says, were more alien than others--

After seeing magazine photographs taken from the shuttle Voyager 2 of Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, Eisenbud suddenly recognized some of Serios's previously unidentified thoughtographs as images of the moons of Jupiter. That made sense, as Serios had long been obsessed with Voyager 2; what did not make sense, however, was that those thoughtographs had been produced years before the Voyager 2 pictures were taken.